| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: worship the same God, like Carriere at Nantes, and see what grace
and gifts he too might obtain at that altar?
But why so cruel? Because, with many of these men, I more than
suspect, there were wrongs to be avenged deeper than any wrongs done
to the sixth sense of vanity. Wrongs common to them, and to a great
portion of the respectable middle class, and much of the lower
class: but wrongs to which they and their families, being most in
contact with the noblesse, would be especially exposed; namely,
wrongs to women.
Everyone who knows the literature of that time, must know what I
mean: what had gone on for more than a century, it may be more than
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy: Scarlatina is a contagious disease; so, when one lives in a large
city, half the family has to move away from its residence (we did
it twice), and yet every man in the city is a centre through
which pass innumerable diameters, carrying threads of all sorts
of contagions. There is no obstacle: the baker, the tailor, the
coachman, the laundresses.
"And I would undertake, for every man who moves on account of
contagion, to find in his new dwelling-place another contagion
similar, if not the same.
"But that is not all. Every one knows rich people who, after a
case of diphtheria, destroy everything in their residences, and
The Kreutzer Sonata |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Timaeus by Plato: he himself was the author, but he committed to his offspring the creation
of the mortal. From him they received the immortal soul, but themselves
made the body to be its vehicle, and constructed within another soul which
was mortal, and subject to terrible affections--pleasure, the inciter of
evil; pain, which deters from good; rashness and fear, foolish counsellors;
anger hard to be appeased; hope easily led astray. These they mingled with
irrational sense and all-daring love according to necessary laws and so
framed man. And, fearing to pollute the divine element, they gave the
mortal soul a separate habitation in the breast, parted off from the head
by a narrow isthmus. And as in a house the women's apartments are divided
from the men's, the cavity of the thorax was divided into two parts, a
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